What the heck? Do the family courts really take away people’s babies because of bob the builder toy cars?

Nope. They do not. The Daily Mail article is misleading, and below is a bit more information to help those who might have been worried about this news article, to understand a bit more about it.

The source

The article is based upon a longer judgment that has been published on the BAILII website. That judgment is freely accessible to anyone interested in finding out more and you can read it here : SCST v O, A & U V [2018] EWFC B24 (17 May 2018). The Daily Mail don’t link to the judgment, because that would make it obvious that their new article is a distortion of the facts.

It’s a shame that the judgment that has been published refers to an earlier judgment that papers to give more detail about the background of the case, but that first judgment isn’t publicly available.

The headline

If you read the headline closely you will notice that the newspaper use the word ‘after’ in rather than ‘because’. The Daily Mail (and other papers) do this a lot – if you read the headline literally it means that the child was removed AFTER the child sat in a toy car, which is factually accurate – the child sat in the car and at some point later in time the court made a decision. But what most readers will take from the headline is that the mother letting the child sit in a toy car was the REASON that the child was removed (as if the word was ‘because’). The headline isn’t strictly inaccurate but it is misleading. The car incident was not the reason, and it wasn’t even one of the main reasons that this little boy couldn’t live with his mum.

The article itself

There is a bit more information in the article, which makes it clear that there was more to it than the headline suggests, but it still isn’t accurate if you compare it to the judgment.

The article begins with repeating the headline and then setting out that there were concerns about basic parenting skills, that the woman had not fed the boy appropriately and had not changed his nappy appropriately.

How can a nurse have such low intellectual ability that she is unable to look after her children?

The headline and first line of the article emphasise that the mother is a qualified nurse. She is also reported to have a low level of cognitive ability. This is confirmed but otherwise unexplained in the judgment – one would not normally expect someone who has qualified as a nurse to have such low levels of cognitive ability that she could not parent her children safely, but there are a number of possible explanations for this. It’s a shame the published judgment doesn’t help us understand this oddity.

The Daily Mail make a point of saying :

To qualify as a nurse a student usually takes a degree course for which they generally need an A Level in biology or another science.

Courses are made up of work placements, lectures, exams and practical tests.

which seems designed to cast doubt on whether the mother can really have suffered from the intellectual difficulties the court said she had. We think that the need for a degree and an A level in a science subject is the current requirements for nurse training in this country, when it may be that the mother qualified as a nurse elsewhere or many years ago when / where requirements were less demanding (we don’t know the mother’s country of origin or age).

It is also possible that the mother had an acquired brain injury (car accident, assault etc) or some degenerative or other condition that affected her ability after she qualified as a nurse (e.g. early onset dementia, brain tumour). Some severe chronic substance abuse can affect cognitive ability. These aren’t mentioned in the judgment, so this is really speculative – but the simple fact is we just don’t know and nor do the Daily Mail. Whilst we might like an explanation to this oddity the judgment will have been written mainly for the benefit of the people involved rather than for us, and those people will already know the background to the mother’s difficulties (which may be in the first judgment) and don’t need it spelling out again.

We do know from the published judgment that the court had held a fact finding hearing, and that both parents had findings made against them. We don’t know what these were – but they seem to have included domestic abuse and physical injuries to the child. It is clear from the judgment that there is some history of domestic abuse and conflict between M and the father of the older two children, and that the court considered that the children had been harmed by being exposed to this. From the judgment the children were continuing to be exposed to arguments between the mother and the father of the older children even at supervised contact, and that although they were ‘deeply distressed’ the mother did not accept her behaviour had fallen short.

It is also clear that findings of were made against the mother and the father of the baby, and they included that he suffered physical harm at the hands of his father which his mother failed to protect him from. It appears from the judgment that they are no longer in a relationship.

Again, the parties to the case already have a judgment setting out exactly what findings were made so the judge hasn’t set them all out again in the judgment just for our benefit, so we won’t know the fine detail unless or until the court publishes the earlier judgment (we’ve checked and we can’t find it but it may appear in due course).

What is clear from the judgment we do have is that the mother had been assessed by a psychologist and had a low enough level of ability to need a specialised assessment (a PAMs assessment, which is typically used where parents have learning disabilities) – that assessment showed a range of concerns including :

A further problem was that the mother didn’t really accept that she had these difficulties with her parenting, so it was difficult to help her improve.

There is a passing reference to a Bob The Builder toy car in the judgment. Although the Daily Mail do state in their article is that the reason the social worker was concerned about this was that there was a potential risk of the baby falling if the mother lost control of him, this is buried towards the end of the article, below various images and video clips of Bob the Builder and the reality is that many readers will have been so worried or distracted by the headline and first few lines of the article that they won’t have picked up these details further down.

It is clear from reading the judgment that this Bob the Builder car ‘issue’ is just one example of various safety concerns that the judge has picked out to illustrate a broader point, and as we’ve described above this was far from the only concern.

The breadth of the issues, and in particular the fact that there were previous findings of harm to the children, including the baby, are not captured in the Daily Mail article, and we think overall it creates a misleading picture of why this baby was not able to live with his mum.

What we will do now

We are going to try and post a comment on the Mail article with a link to the judgment and a comment with a link to this blog post. In our experience these don’t get published but fingers crossed.

We are also going to ask the Mail to amend their headline and article to make clear that the child was removed for a broad range of reasons. If they don’t make an amendment we will consider escalating the matter to IPSO (press regulator).

We will update this post if we get a response, if our comment is published or if the original judgment is eventually published.

17 Comments

It’s extremely worrying (if not terrifying) if there are 1200 comments on a misleading piece like this. Unless they all deny it can be true, of course. This level of public misunderstanding fostered by the Mail should be factored in to any complaint taken to IPSO.

It is perfectly clear that the mother in this case is a qualified nurse who has never harmed her son or allowed any harm to befall him.
As usual social workers aided by a compliant judge have decided to use their crystal balls ,tarot cards,and tealeaves,to try and predict a grim future for this poor child who is now no doubt ultimately destined to feed the forced adoption industry.
Child snatching from sane law abiding parents for imaginary future risks is an abomination and those responsible should be locked up for a very long time;

The Builder toy car that was ‘inappropriate’ for his age
•Qualified nurse has one-year-old boy taken from her care by social services
•Woman has ‘extremely low range of intellectual ability’, family court hears
•She left child in a Bob The Builder toy car that was ‘inappropriate’ for his age
•Concerns also raised over the feeding and nappy changing of the baby

This is the actual headline in the Mail and it is in fact very fair as it lists all the main concerns of the judge in this case.

Exactly Ian. I don’t buy this list of suggested reasons as to why the mother might have suffered brain injury after qualifying as a nurse etc. it’s all too convenient. If she was foreign and was allowed to practice in the UK, for sure if her practice was substandard it would have been noticed by superiors. She wasn’t with either of the fathers, so risk from the father of the baby was gone and as for arguing at contact, there are simple ways to resolve that such as having an alternative person bring them to contact with their father. As was clear, the guardian’s assessment did not find the same deficits as the ISW which indicates that the mother had taken on board any criticisms and resolved them. This also proves that she was not refusing to accept support. As for one of the children accidentally hurting the other, that can happen in any home no matter how vigilant you are. I suspect that being under the eye of someone looking to find fault, most of the time they will always find fault. This whole thing stinks to high heaven and I read precisely nothing that showed me this lady needed to lose her children. Another family destroyed needlessly. Shame on this country.

EJ,
You are entitled to take the view that this decision was not valid, but we think it would help to explain the relevance of the past relationships and domestic abuse. From a legal perspective the relevance of the previous domestic abuse is potentially twofold – were the children suffering or at risk of suffering significant harm when the case began? If so the court is entitled to go on and consider what the future should look like. So this is a ‘threshold’ concern that opens the door to allowing the court to consider matters further. Secondly, even if abuse is in the past it may still be affecting the children AND there may be a risk that the mother has a pattern of forming abusive relationships that is likely to recur, so the risk may only be temporarily reduced.
As to the mother’s cognitive difficulties, as we note in our post, it is not completely clear how the mother was both a practising nurse and had such substantial cognitive issues, but that said there is no particular evidence to suggest that she didn’t genuinely have those difficulties – and she appears to have been thoroughly assessed before that conclusion was reached. We suggest some possible explanations for the apparent oddity in our post.
You are right that children are hurt by siblings at home all the time but the issue in this case (from the judge’s point of view) seems to have been the range of issues that were cropping up and the mother’s difficulty in preventing them. Probably if it had been this issue alone that would have been the end of it, but from the judgment there were a number of different concerns some quite serious – and they court took the view that the risks were too high.

“From a legal perspective the relevance of the previous domestic abuse is potentially twofold – were the children suffering or at risk of suffering significant harm when the case began? If so the court is entitled to go on and consider what the future should look like. So this is a ‘threshold’ concern that opens the door to allowing the court to consider matters further.”

If that’s what the law states then as they say, the law is an ass.

“Secondly, even if abuse is in the past it may still be affecting the children AND there may be a risk that the mother has a pattern of forming abusive relationships that is likely to recur, so the risk may only be temporarily reduced.”

Simply resolved by Child in Need plans if it really is the case. Does not require removal of children. This isn’t the film “Minority Report”!

“it is not completely clear how the mother was both a practising nurse and had such substantial cognitive issues, but that said there is no particular evidence to suggest that she didn’t genuinely have those difficulties – and she appears to have been thoroughly assessed before that conclusion was reached”

Come on. You know there are many so-called “court experts” in this racket, it’s a gravy train and they will say whatever LAs ask them to say or at least base their conclusions on wholly biased and often inaccurate information provided up front by the LA. Do you think they would get repeat business if they told the truth and it didn’t favour the LA’s case?

As for it not being clear, it’s not clear because it’s clearly ludicrous to say a qualified nurse has learning difficulties. This cannot simply be brushed aside and whatever you may say about tabloid sensationalist headlines, they have clearly got to the heart of the matter and the very point their article made, was what ridiculously low thresholds are being used to take children.

Judges suffer judicial bias, they are humans and I’m sorry to say more than a few are part of this “child protection” racket, rubber stamping LA applications and not giving parents a chance to prove allegations false. Let’s be honest here.

Re your first point : that is indeed what the law says. It is drafted so as to protect parents from the overbearing state – in that if the threshold is not crossed the court simply has no power to remove children, because that would be to engage in social engineering. Only if the threshold of significant harm is crossed can the court consider whether to make a care order (but it doesn’t have to and may not be justified at the end of the day in doing so).

Re your second point : the whole thrust of the post is to explain that it wasn’t one single issue that led to the decision. A number of the issues in isolation might have been capable of some form of fix, but the judge thought that taken all together the risks could not be adequately reduced / managed.

Re your third point about court experts and gravy trains – we are about to publish a guidance note this week about experts, but generally experts are jointly instructed and paid for by all parties in equal shares, in the parents case via legal aid. Whatever recommendations an expert makes is likely to be contrary to the view of one or other party. If experts are of poor quality they are just as likely to be rejected as an expert by the parents lawyers or the child’s lawyers as the local authority’s lawyers, and experts who are known to be very pro a particular viewpoint are likely to be vetoed by the lawyers whose clients this is going to go against.

We agree that the nurse / learning difficulties issue is a bit of a mystery, and we wish things were clearer – but there are a number of possible explanations and we have not seen any evidence that points towards the learning difficulties being anything other than real (for example there doesn’t seem to have been any challenge to the expert’s conclusions).

Nick Hall
on 9 June 2018 at 12:29 pm

What we don’t know is whether the claimed harms were as minor as the Bob the Builder incident. Lots of things ‘could’ have happened. the point is that the child sat there, didn’t fall and wasn’t harmed.

Were there assessments of the mother by her own experts? If not then something is seriously wrong. If so then what did they say?

For a transparency project you seem to have assumed an awful lot in this article. Perhaps it would have been better to wait for some facts first?

I do not think it is terrifying there are 1200 comments. Most of those comments are from people who have witnessed SS involvement in their own family or to their friends. You can see that when reading them. People working in the family court system have a skewed vision of the help you are giving children. Children are being completely screwed and destroyed. The LA’s go in and promise the earth, and deliver nothing. They are more negligent than any parent I have ever met whose child is in care. I am sorry to be so blunt but it is how it is. In my case [edited] How is that ‘CARE’. System is garbage and people who work in it seem to have no idea, cos you are all so deeply submerged in it. Do not say it is now SWs but judges – no, judges listen to SWs and CAFCASS. It does not matter what evidence parents have, what the child says (even at almost 16) the judges just do what the LA ask for – usually they are seen as honest professionals, despite repeated evidence they lie, distort, manipulate to get what they want. I am a professional myself and would be sacked immediately if I behaved as SWs do. Get care order discharged?? Yes that will take another 6 months. She is suicidal as she can not be returned and psych says this – my choice?? 6 month care proceedings. She will either be dead, sectioned or medicated. NO point writing a complaint. LA deliberately only replies after 6 months (minus 1 day) when it can to LGO. when the You must forgive me and other parents and their relatives for writing 1200 comments

But where will it all end with the System acting as big brother over parents ability to care for their children. and where do they get off stating children will be harmed due to parents arguing. thats ridiculous as most couples argue. inc Social workers and Judges. some more than others but its quite common. by the way things are going they will need to take all children into care.
when you say “It is clear from the judgment that there is some history of domestic abuse”.
how can it possibly be Clear when the family courts dont require evidence to back up the allegations of social workers. its all hearsay etc. Nothing is clear at all.
you need to step back and look at the bigger picture. you are too close to the subject matter.
Richard Branson learned this valuable point during his journey as a business man.

“On the loud arguments which happened while T was present, the judge said while it could be seen as unpleasant, allowing that to meet the threshold for significant harm “would be a step too far and lowers the threshold to such a level that a very high percentage of children would be at risk of removal from a very high percentage of families”.”

See our reply to your earlier comment. The judge clearly wasn’t prepared to treat every single concern as ‘significant’, quite rightly – perhaps it would have been more concerning if he did? It certainly shows he didn’t accept everything the local authority said without question. But he did think that overall, looking at all the risks (significant and less significant) the children couldn’t be safely cared for by their mum.